Jessie Montgomery’s Cello Concerto and the Question of Musical Legacy

As orchestral music continues to reassess whose stories it tells and how authority is expressed through sound, These Righteous Paths enters the repertoire as a work shaped by remembrance rather than monument. Montgomery’s concerto approaches legacy not as something fixed or inherited intact, but as a living practice—one formed through collaboration, listening, and the deliberate act of looking back in order to move forward.

The concerto emerges from Montgomery’s engagement with the writing of her mother, Robbie McCauley, a playwright and performer associated with the Black theatre movement that followed the Civil Rights era in the United States. Rather than adapting specific texts, Montgomery treats her mother’s language as a reservoir of rhythm, gesture, and emotional contour. The result is music that listens backward while refusing nostalgia, framing remembrance as an active, ongoing process.

This orientation toward the past is articulated through the Sankofa concept, a West African symbol that describes the necessity of returning to what has been left behind in order to move forward. In musical terms, the concerto traces familiar shapes—song-like melodies, repetitive figures, echoes of dance and procession—only to stretch and reconfigure them. The form resists neat closure, unfolding instead as a series of crossings between reflection and propulsion.

Central to that movement is the presence of cellist Abel Selaocoe, for whom the work was conceived. Selaocoe’s practice extends beyond conventional instrumental roles, incorporating voice, improvisation, and rhythmic patterns drawn from multiple traditions. Montgomery’s score does not treat these elements as surface color but embeds them into the concerto’s structure, allowing shifts between baroque-inflected continuo textures, groove-based passages, and expansive orchestral writing to coexist without hierarchy.

The opening performances place the piece in dialogue with established orchestral repertoire, from Leonard Bernstein to Richard Wagner. This context matters. By situating These Righteous Paths alongside canonical works, presenters frame it not as a thematic exception or commemorative gesture, but as part of a living continuum of large-scale musical expression. The concerto’s themes of migration, ancestry, and renewal resonate differently when heard against the inherited weight of the symphonic tradition itself.

Montgomery’s broader body of work has consistently engaged with questions of community and social presence, often blurring distinctions between concert music, vernacular forms, and collaborative practice. Her recent orchestral and chamber works suggest an ongoing effort to expand what orchestral music can hold, both sonically and culturally, without abandoning its formal ambitions.

As These Righteous Paths travels from Berlin to Brussels, Wrocław, Toronto, and beyond, it offers a model of how contemporary composition can address loss without retreating into private symbolism. Instead, Montgomery proposes listening as a collective act: a way of acknowledging what has been passed down while remaining open to what has yet to be formed.

In that sense, the concerto speaks not only to the specifics of one family history but to a wider moment in music-making, where tradition is no longer a fixed inheritance but a set of paths continually re-walked, revised, and re-sounded.